Queering the Post-Soviet

Sverdlov Square, 1930s-1980s (from the Moscow series)

The Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs invites you to join us for a lecture by Yevgeniy Fiks on his recent work. Following the presentation, Fiks will will be joined by Ivan Savvine & Matvei Yankelevich for a conversation and Q&A session.

For well over a decade, Fiks has produced many projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West, among them: “Lenin for Your Library?” in which he mailed V.I. Lenin’s text "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” to one hundred global corporations as a donation for their corporate libraries; “Communist Party USA,” a series of portraits of current members of Communist Party USA, painted from life; and “Communist Guide to New York City,” a series of photographs of buildings and public places in New York City that are connected to the history of the American Communist movement. His most recent work has broadened this project to include the two nations relations to homosexuality: the Soviet Union’s during it’s 70+ year existence and the USA’s during the height of the Cold War, when communism and homosexuality were twinned in the fevered minds of the American cold-warriors.

Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and working in New York since 1994. Fiks most recent book, Moscow, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2013 and his solo show at Winkleman Gallery, “Homosexuality Is Stalin's Atom Bomb to Destroy America,” was up earlier this spring. In addition to Winkleman, Fiks’ work has been shown at Postmasters gallery (New York), Mass MoCA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Marat Guelman Gallery (Moscow), Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (Mexico City), and the Museu Colecção Berardo (Lisbon). His work has been included in the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011, 2009, 2007 and 2005), the Biennale of Sydney (2008) and the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007).

Ivan Savvine is a New York City-based art historian, writer, and curator who emigrated from Russia nine years ago and was granted asylum in the United States. After working as a consultant on numerous gay asylum cases, he became involved with the cause, writing extensively on the topic and eventually curating the Asylum exhibition in New York and publishing a book of the same title. Presently, Ivan is an in-house curator at 287 Spring Art Gallery & Performance Space in SoHo, New York City, and a freelance writer who covers art and politics.

Matvei Yankelevich is a co-founder Ugly Duckling Presse, where he curates the Eastern European Poets Series. Yankelevich‘s most recent books are the poetry collection Alpha Donut (United Artists Books) and the novella-in-fragments Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books). Matvei has taught courses on Translation, Artists Books, Little Magazines, and 20th Century Russian Poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts and Russian Literature at Hunter College. Since 2009, he is member of the Writing faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Listen to a podcast of Yevgeniy discussing his show at Winkleman on Modern Art Notes with Tyler Green.